Once your administrator connects a Dropbox account to your nation, you can access and update your nation’s website theme files and custom page templates right from the shared Dropbox folder on your computer - no extra downloading or uploading required. Making changes to files is as easy as loading them up in your favorite text editor. Your files in Dropbox will automatically sync them to your nation’s theme.

Preview your changes

All file changes from your Dropbox folder are loaded into your website’s Preview mode, allowing you to safely view and redesign theme and custom page template files before publishing them live to the world. There’s no caching in Preview mode, so you’ll always see your most recent changes. Once you’re ready and happy with your design, you can publish all your changes to your website at once.

Share and design together

You can easily invite others to work on a website theme with you by sharing folders with Dropbox. Sharing settings are all managed within the connected Dropbox account. And, with Dropbox’s built-in version history, all changes by you and your collaborators are available, so you can always review or revert edits.

Create an account

We were pretty excited about this update since it would allow our developers on PC to get on board with theme-syncing. However, after trialling it for a few weeks now, we’ve decided to disconnect from Dropbox. I’m not sure if it’s because we’re based in Australia, but we’ve found that there’s way too much latency and caching going on with this system to make it useful for efficient development.

Worse yet, the need to publish theme changes (and then confirm the publishing!) from within the Nation itself is a real pain and slows things down even further.

Considering all this, it’s a shame you’ve decided to cancel service for the Mac ThemeSync app.

I’m open to further developments for this Dropbox solution, but where it stands now, it’s much less frustrating and more efficient to just make edits directly to theme files in NationBuilder and use Git to handle version-control when necessary.

This was awesome when it worked last month…and now it stopped. NB doesn’t see my changes to theme templates synced with Dropbox. If I remove and replace the file, my theme reverts to the default version of that template without recourse. Just me?

I sent an email to Help about this, but after I synced, there were many template files that did not download to Dropbox to begin with (maybe about 10% of files), meaning I can’t edit them. Once one syncs their NB account with Dropbox, you can no longer edit the old way, online in the Control Panel with Custom Templates.

Would like to suggest that having a dev-mode “always publish” option to newly synced files would be highly valuable when syncing files. Why: needing to be logged in to see previewed theme changes means that you can’t effectively view some logged-out or sorta-logged-in states of various pages, which is essential for testing. Needing to publish every time to look at logged-out page states means effectively having to keep hitting the publish button in the files section, despite having file syncing offloaded to Dropbox.